The five values most important to me are honesty, integrity, humor, work ethic, and compassion. I try to live my life by these values although I haven’t always done so. I like to believe I have learned a little bit about these values from every situation I’ve ever been in although I have to admit that I learned most of them from my time in the Marine Corps. Even though the Marine Corps played a huge part in shaping these values for me, it wasn’t responsible for my knowledge about them. If anything the Marine Corps reinforced why it’s important to live by a code of values you can call your own.

I’ve learned a little about these core values in every part of my life. However, upon completing this exercise I learned that many of my values became important to me and became part of my everyday life because of my time in the Marine Corps. This surprised me because I never really liked being in the military and I had no idea it had such a big role in shaping who I am today. I believe that I have a solid set of values to live my life by and I am happy with the way I act when I use them in my everyday life. I do however, think I need to use more judgment in using humor in my everyday life because it does tend to get me in trouble in serious situation that don’t call for humor or situations that are not appropriate for me to be disruptive. I also feel like sometimes my value of work ethic gets in the way of my happiness because I am a lazy person by nature, who would be happy spending most nights on the couch in front of the television. I tend to push myself to spend extra time on homework on life’s obligations when I’d really like to be playing video games or watching television. On the other hand I believe it makes me a better person which in the end will make me a happier person than a couple hours of video games would. While my values are what makes me who I am and while I do believe they are the right ones for me they have created problems for me in the past. When I was in Iraq I was in charge of a squad of Marines on a forward operating base. A Marine fell asleep on watch one night and I had to wake him up. I was in a dilemma because of the circumstances surrounding the situation. We had been asked to go on 4 hours sleep per night for the last month on this forward operating base. This kid had been on watch every night that I could remember and had been working hard each day. He was a good Marine and a friend of mine. My values of honesty and integrity told me I had to report my friend for falling asleep on watch because it was a big violation of orders and he had put us all at risk of attack while asleep. On the other hand my value of compassion told me to let it slide and not inform my commanders of the incident because of the brutal work hours we had been put under. I believe it could have happened to anyone and all that would come from me telling someone would be him getting severely disciplined in an already harsh war zone. Why put someone through that when we are all already miserable in a hot desert fighting a war. My value of compassion won out in the end and I did not tell anyone about the violation. I feel like I made the right decision because he knew he messed up and having him suffer more at the hands of our superiors wouldn’t do anything but make him more miserable. I feel like my core values are in line with those of the social work profession because although they aren’t exactly the same I believe they encourage the same actions. Both of our value systems ask us to treat people with care, compassion and respect. They ask us to do our jobs and do them right and to never compromise. In particular the social work value of Integrity is most important to me because it is one I share with them. It is a great value to live your life by because if you have integrity you are honest, uncompromising and you do what is right regardless of the circumstance. I believe I live by this value every day. I try to always be honest and I try to always do what I know is right, even if I do it with no recognition from others.